City of Ships – Ultraluminal
Ultraluminal is the new LP from Austin, TX / Brooklyn, NY based post-rock outfit City of Ships. I was lucky enough to jump on a portion of their 2012 summer tour and I thought they were on-point back then, but they’ve done nothing but grow in the past three years. In the album’s first single, “Alarm,” […]
Roots Music: The Berlin School of Electronic Music – Part 1
How Analog Sequencers Work By now, you’ve most likely heard how Moog has reintroduced some of their original analog synthesizers. What makes something like a System 55 so desirable? It has something digital synthesizers can be hard-pressed to match: user control. From the way you modify the frequency of an oscillator to the way you turn a […]
New Gear Report: Epiphone Tony Iommi SG Custom & Numark MixTrack3
Epiphone Tony Iommi SG Custom This isn’t the first signature model for Tony Iommi, the founding guitarist of doom metal pioneers Black Sabbath, but it may be the the most appealing. Iommi’s past signature SGs include a limited-run Gibson Custom Shop model, and a signature version of the Epiphone G-400. But where those models fell on opposite […]
How to Upgrade SampleTank 2.x to SampleTank 3
SampleTank 3, the long-awaited update to IK Multimedia’s well-established sample-based software instrument, was released in fall 2014 with much fanfare. IK’s version 3.5 update — free for ST3 owners — arrived in spring 2015, enticing even more new users with 11 new sound libraries plus reliability improvements. It’s easy to see why SampleTank 3 is […]
Lower Dens – Escape From Evil
On the surface, Lower Dens’ newest album, Escape From Evil, is the most pop album the group has put out to date. It rides the growing wave of modern bands adding subtle synth hooks over nostalgic, drawn-out lyrics of unrequited love, which makes sense when you consider the lead singer Jana Hunter wrote half the album […]
Episode 26 – Jack McCoy
Chris talks to longtime surf filmmaker, Jack McCoy, about all things surfing, stoke and aloha!
Body Shop: The Dreadnought
Invented by necessity The dreadnought, perhaps the defining shape of acoustic guitar as we know it, has quite the storied past. Back in the early 20th century, most of the acoustic guitars at the time were of smaller-bodied design, with a more treble-focused sound that required the use of a bass instrument in the band to […]
Self-Oscillation Compact Delay Shootout
Self-Oscillation: noun The generation and maintenance of a periodic motion by a source of power that lacks any corresponding periodicity. That’s the technical definition of self-oscillation, but you don’t need to understand that to know how self-oscillating delay effects work. What you see going on in the video above is a result of turning up […]
